Springboard

6

Abe Kent had long ago come to terms with most of his fears. Not that he had lost them — there were still plenty of things that could worry him, if he let them: Going blind, or senile, or stroking out into paralysis, these were fears he still carried, but he had learned to control them rather than letting his fears control him.

The way he dealt with them was to pay attention and not deliberately do things that might cause them, at least as much as he could. He ate well, stayed in shape, and had routine physicals. He didn’t drink much alcohol, save for a little wine or beer now and then, and had given up smoking his pipe twenty years back. There were no guarantees, of course, and in the end something was going to kill him, but a quick and sudden end didn’t scare him. He had come close to that often enough that he had been, as far as he was concerned, living on borrowed time for most of his life.

He had been a good Marine. Would have made general by now if he hadn’t been quite as good — if he’d been prepared to let things slide in ways he hadn’t been willing to do. So, the worst thing that Roger Ellis could do to him was kick him out of his job, and when he looked back over his shoulder, there was not a lot he regretted. As a result, Kent wasn’t afraid of this meeting.

Still, there was a twinge of… unease… as he approached the door of the Pentagon office with his guard and guide, who was also a Marine. A kid, maybe twenty-eight, and a sergeant, who knew who he was.

It had started to drizzle on the way over from Quantico. Maybe that was an omen.

“Here we are, sir. I’ll be back to collect you when you are done.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

“Semper fi, sir.”

Kent grinned at the kid. “You know it, son.”

Ellis had put on a few pounds, and looked paler than when Kent had last seen him, about five years ago. Ellis had been a colonel then, making general a couple of months later. Kent had sent him a congratulations card.

Sent him a second card when he got bumped up another star a year ago. No point in being bitter about it.

“Abe, how are you?” Ellis asked.

“Fine, General.”

“Come in, have a seat.”

Kent did so.

Ellis liked to beat around the bush a little before he got down to business, and the two men exchanged did-you-hears and guess-who-dieds and such for a couple of minutes. Finally, Ellis arrived at the point:

“So, tell me about Net Force. The military arm.”

“We have some good people. Lot of regulars from the service. John Howard put together a sharp team. Good training, good gear, good support, both from the Guard and the Net Force Commander.”

“Never thought I’d see the day when you’d be in the Guard,” Ellis said.

“Well. I’d pretty much come to the end of the road in the Corps, hadn’t I? Another few years as a doddering, superannuated colonel, teaching at a college somewhere, running some logistics kiosk, that was how I was going to end my career. When John Howard called me, it seemed like a way to do something worth doing with the last of my active duty time.” He paused. “I never was much good as a desk commander.”

Ellis nodded. “You angered some very shiny brass, Abe. You know that. What did you expect?”

Kent shook his head. “I knew what would happen, General. It’s just that I couldn’t let the consequences affect my decision. You know what went down, sir. What would you have done, in my place?”

Ellis pondered that for a moment. “Well, I’d like to say I’d have done the same thing. The Marines ought not be baby-sitters for the sons of rich elected officials.” He paused. “But I’ve always been more, ah… flexible… than you. I think I’d have caught the drift and done some fast talking. Hell, even after you knocked the kid’s teeth out, you could have bowed and kissed a ring or two and they would have let it slide.”

“Probably.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, sir.”

“If you had it to do over again, you’d do the same thing, wouldn’t you?”

This was, Kent knew, a loaded question. Ellis was trying to find out which way he was going to jump if put under pressure. The smart answer would be to say, “No.” That he had come to see the error of his ways, and that what the Corps wanted was more important than any sense of personal honor or pride one of its colonels might feel. That was the smart answer.

Kent said, “Yes, sir, I’d do it exactly the same.”

Ellis grinned. “I’m happy to see you haven’t lost your backbone, Abe. Me, I’m a political animal. I’ll bend if the breeze is strong enough, but I want a man with courage in the trenches when push comes to shove.”

“It’s a risk, of course, using me. You realize that, sir.”

Ellis nodded. “Yes. But let me tell you a little story.”

The general glanced over at a framed photograph on his desk. From where Kent sat, he couldn’t tell if it was a 3-D holoproj or not, but the frame looked like an old-fashioned 2-D still shot. “My parents used to have a dog, a big old German shepherd named King. One night, my father got up in the middle of the night to go pee and he looked down and saw a big splotch of blood on the carpet in the bedroom. He went looking for King and found him in the kitchen, a puddle of blood on the floor.”

Ellis looked back at the colonel. “The dog had a nosebleed. My mother got up, and she and my father ran around with towels and cotton balls, wiping things up and trying to get the bleeding stopped. Only they couldn’t. There wasn’t an all-night vet clinic anywhere around, so they sat up all night with the dog, petting and trying to calm him, catching the dripping blood with a towel. Early in the morning, they took King to the local vet’s office, and waited until it opened. My father sat on the stoop outside the office with the dog’s head on his lap, the blood soaking into his trousers. The vet finally got the bleeding stopped, but since there was no sign of any injury that could have cause his nose to go off like that, and it had never happened before, he wanted to run some tests. He did. They set my old man back four hundred and fifty dollars.”

Ellis paused, then gave the colonel a little smile. “What they found, Abe, was that the dog had had a nosebleed. There was nothing major wrong with him that could have caused it. It might never happen again. A four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar nosebleed.”

He smiled again, then shook his head. “But my parents didn’t begrudge the money. The dog was part of the family; they loved it in the same way they’d loved the children when we’d lived at home. King slept at the foot of their bed; they took him for walks, and in the back of the car when they went out. As much as they were his pack, he was their dog.”

He paused again. “So what I am saying, Colonel, is that it works both ways. When you have people who are loyal, you owe them that in return.”

Kent nodded.

“You run your unit the way it needs to be run. We’ll do the paperwork, get the chain of command sorted out, all that, but — welcome back to the Corps. I’ll try to keep the sticklers off your back as best I can.” Ellis stood, and put his hand out.

Kent came to his feet and extended his own hand.

“Thank you, sir,” Kent said. And he was surprised at how good it felt to hear Ellis say what he’d said. Back in the Corps.

Home.

The day was warm, and made for much sweat. The humidity was such that the sweat evaporated very slowly, offering little cooling.

Wu had never been a gifted athlete; rather, he had been dogged in his determination. He learned how to pace himself. Like the mythical race between the tortoise and the hare, in which the slower creature could only win if the faster one faltered, Wu became adept at being steady. In a short sprint, unless your opponent pulled a hamstring or fell and broke an ankle, steadiness was not enough. But in a much longer contest, the opportunities for an opponent’s misfortune were greater.

As Wu clambered up over the wooden wall, using the inset pegs for hand- and footholds, he reflected upon the many pitfalls a smart tortoise could lay for a dull hare.

Wu had read Sun Tzu’s Art of War enough times that he had much of it memorized. The Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi’s work, A Book of Five Rings, was another work that Wu knew and understood. A man who stood on a hill and saw danger approaching had an advantage over one who walked around a curve in the road and ran into it surprised. Forewarned was forearmed.

Wu topped the barrier and slid down the other side. Ahead, a long and thick snarl of razor wire covered the ground like a low roof, leaving a gap under it less than a meter from the dirt. The snarl was twenty meters long. One could crawl on one’s belly or lie upon one’s back and scoot along under it, pushing with one’s feet and wiggling. The back method was a hair faster for most, and easier on the elbows. But you could not see ahead as well, and once you cleared the wire, you were, for a few seconds, lying upon your back. Wu attacked this obstacle on his belly and suffered the greater discomfort. He had long ago learned that the first to shoot did not always win. Accuracy was more important than speed.

He smiled as he recalled the recording he had seen of Locke and Mayli making love. There was a man who knew all about sex, Wu had to give him that. He had learned things watching, and it would be interesting to try these techniques out.

But now was not the time to be thinking of such things. A man distracted on the field of battle would likely not live to regret it.

He dropped to the ground and began to crawl. Ahead of him, he saw the feet of an officer essaying the obstacle, toes down, also a belly-crawler.

Being able to see a wide swath, the larger picture, had advantages. There were times when wide and shallow served better than narrow and deep. The ability to see breadth and depth together was Wu’s gift. Such was necessary for a general in battle. Small-picture men very often died with eyes gone wide at an attack from an unexpected quarter.

The dirt was hard-packed from all the bodies that had dragged themselves over it. Despite the recent rain, the ground gave not at all. It was like crawling on asphalt. Even under his coverall with its padded elbows and knees, it was not a pleasant sensation.

At the end of the snarl, the ground opened out. You could turn over, but rising any higher than you had been under the wire could be fatal. Today, only the lasers were operating, and sticking an arm or your head up would get you a red dot lighting upon you like a weightless fly. On testing days when soldiers who would join the elite troops crawled here en masse, the laser lights were replaced by machine-gun fire. Every tenth round was a tracer, and you could see how close the bullets passed above you. Over the years, men had died during live-fire exercises.

Wu felt no sympathy for those who had done so. A soldier who panicked here, where the bullets would not drop below a ruler-straight line a meter from the ground? This would not be a man with whom you wished to risk your life in the field where there were no such constraints.

Wu cleared the wire and continued his crawl as if he were still under the jagged-toothed roof. Fifty meters ahead were the ropes — thick hemp lines as big around as his wrist, and you had to climb up them seven meters to reach a platform.

Here was where upper-body physical strength offered an advantage. Wu had long ago learned to use his legs and feet to assist his hands. A strong man could climb the dangling rope using his hands alone, faster than Wu could do his inchworm shinny. There was a time when Wu had done it that way. Even now, he could still manage it — but that was not wise.

Wu had been taking the long view for many years. He had learned long ago there was little value in demonstrating one’s abilities to impress others. The ropes ahead were not the last obstacle. Others that needed muscle lay ahead, and pacing was important. Wu had learned how to fight smarter, not harder. Arriving at one’s goal first but exhausted was not the formula for victory.

Wu smiled again, and continued crawling toward the ropes.

Thorn’s arm and shoulder were already aching, but he still had thirty more cycles to go with the katana. He stood in front of the mirror in his home salle, the wooden sheath of the Japanese weapon at his left hip placed so the cutting edge was up, held in place by a karate-style cloth belt. The sheath was lacquered a shiny jet; the blade, nearly mirror-bright, had the patterns and clay-temper line that identified the sword as one of the traditional folded-steel weapons lovingly created by a master craftsman. This particular weapon, one Thorn had only just acquired a month ago, wore a handle of pebbled manta-ray skin, under the traditional diamond-wrap silk cord, the butt capped with bronze, and an iron tsuba, or guard. It was of the New Sword period—“New” being a relative term, since it had been made in Musashi Province by Korekazu, or one of his students, four hundred years ago.

Under the handle, which was held in place by a bamboo peg, inscribed in Japanese characters upon the tang, was the name of the smith, the year the blade was made, and a phrase that Thorn had been told translated to “one fortunate day in February, this blade was made” along with the surname of the original owner. Below that, there was another inscription that said “three-body.” This latter was, Thorn had learned, the number of men, stacked one upon another, that the sword had cleaved through during its sharpness test. It did not indicate whether those men had been alive or dead when the test had been done; apparently, both were commonly used…

The folded Damascus-style steel was relatively flexible, with the edge tempered to a harder state. This gave the blade great cutting qualities, better than that of many modern steels. Thorn had seen a vid once, an old rip from a home shopping channel, in which the salesman was demonstrating a stainless-steel copy of a katana. He talked about how sturdy it was, and to show that, whacked the spine on the table in front of him several times.

On the last whack, the blade snapped in half, and the broken part flew up and stabbed the man in the biceps.

Newer did not always mean better…

One of the big advantages of having money was that you could buy such things as this treasure. It had cost as much as a new Mercedes, and with care could be around another four hundred years.

Thorn smiled. It would be interesting to see how well an eight-hundred-year-old Mercedes ran…

He took a deep breath and tried to ignore the burn in his deltoids. Relaxing as much as he could, he reached across his body with his right hand. He tried to allow his consciousness to expand, to achieve a total awareness the Japanese called zanshin. Such was the goal of an iaido practitioner using the live blade.

In Japanese, do meant “way.” This was different from the more warlike arts, which were usually known as jutsu. Iaido was not an ancient art, according to what Abe Kent had taught him, but a term that came into being in the early 1930s. The parent art, iaijutsu, had been around for many centuries, but since, as in Western fencing, killing people with a sword these days was more or less frowned upon in polite society, the killing arts had evolved…

There were all kinds of formalities to iaido—ranging from detailed instructions on how to clean the blade, and precisely how to tie the string of the bag in which the sword was carried, to how to stand, sit, bow — everything. But there were only four parts to iaido once you were ready to move: the draw, the cut, the shaking of blood, and the return to the sheath. Kent had told him the Japanese names—nukisuki, kiritsuke, chiburui, and noto—but had also said that the names weren’t important.

The goal was simple: A master swordsman became one with the blade. After countless hours of practice, the idea was that there would be no conscious thought involved when action was required. One moment, you stood facing your imaginary opponents, the next, the sword was in your hand and you cut them down. The moment after that, you shook the blood from your blade and put it away. All without raising your heartbeat…

The samurai sword was primarily a slashing rather than a thrusting weapon, though it could be used as such, and very much unlike a foil, épée, or saber in weight, balance, or effectiveness. Yes, a master fencer of the French, Italian, or Spanish schools would almost certainly stab a master iaido-ist first, a straight-line thrust being faster than a broad slash. In a match, with buttoned weapons, this would be enough. However, in a real duel, a stab would probably not be instantly fatal. Your opponent could be dying, but still able to move, and the result of such a situation against a man with a razor-sharp katana and the knowledge and determination to use it would most likely be ai-uchi—mutual slaying. To give that first thrust, you would expose yourself to the return cut. Mutual slaying was an accepted goal for the Japanese — the way of the samurai, the saying went, is found in death.

Historically, Western swordsmen generally wanted to pink their opponents, kill them if necessary, and walk away. If all you wanted to do was commit suicide, you could jump off a high bridge. If a man was willing to die to take you with him, that gave such a man, Thorn thought, a decided advantage.

He drew the sword, brought it up and over his head, and in the doing, grabbed the handle with his left hand behind the right. It was a two-handed weapon, and the pivot-style grip allowed for great power. He brought the sword down in a cut. You could take a man’s head off with such a strike. Or, in the case of this very blade, cut through a stack of bodies three deep. An adept with such a weapon and willing to die using it would be a formidable opponent. Not somebody you’d want to screw around with.

Thorn moved the blade to his right, released his left hand’s grip, then did a wrist-twirl that spun the sword in a downward circle. He added a snapping, slinging motion that ended the twirl with the blade’s tip pointed at the ground.

Still trying to stay relaxed, he turned the sheath sideways with his left hand, brought the blade up and across his body, the spine toward him, and touched the mouth of the sheath with the back ridge just below the guard. He drew the sword across his body to his right, keeping his left thumb and forefinger lightly pinched over the blade — this was to remove any lingering traces of blood — until the point reached the scabbard’s opening. He pushed the handle forward, away from himself, and lined the blade up, then gently slid it home, until the brass friction plug just ahead of the guard snugged tight. He twisted the sheath back to edge-up position, removed his right hand, then bowed.

Seventy-one. Only twenty-nine more, this session. And, according to Kent, maybe ten thousand or so repetitions to get to the point where he was beginning to get comfortable with the process.

Thorn grinned. He had a long way to go. Still, there was something in the simple motions. Thorn knew that “simple” didn’t mean “easy,” any more than “complex” meant “hard,” but even after only a few months of practice, it was already beginning to feel much more comfortable. Which, when you started waving a razor-sharp blade around, was certainly a good idea…